 Thanks for coming to the presentation, I didn't expect that there would be so many people and frankly speaking I've never presented before such a huge audience so I should apologize in advance if I will forget how to speak or faint just wake me up I will proceed from where I stopped. So the presentation today the name of the presentation is how an exiled pirate media outlet breaks through the Kremlin's propaganda firewall. The long name pretty straightforward and today I would like to tell you the story of the pirate media the story of the small company that has become the most important the biggest independent Russian-speaking media outlet that has been blocked but yet but still we have millions of readers within Russian borders also I'm gonna tell you about the what actually happens within Russia in regards of censorship and tell you that the Russia has become one of the most technically advanced countries in these regards. I'll tell you how being such a big pin in the s of the government Medusa are still alive and as a bonus I'm gonna give you our forecast on what's gonna happen next in upcoming years. Is it okay with you? Thanks guys. So my name is Alex I'm head of technical department I should apologize for the photo of myself it's the design team who put it there. A couple words about myself I started as a network engineer and I'm doing IT staff for almost 18 years already and I feel like I'm the dumbest person in this conference. The other day I approached some kids because I thought they will be smart at the same level smart as myself you know and they told me that they managed to hijack transportation system you know and it was like big impact at my ego so I'm feeling now the dumbest person here sorry for that. Couple words about the technical team of Medusa it's about like 20 person it's developers designers testers product project people and normally before the war in Ukraine we were focused on the development of our products mobile application website side products whatever our infrastructure podcast distribution so on and so forth after the war since we become once again the biggest pin in the s of the government we started spending the waste the best part of our time trying to protect ourselves from attacks and trying to sneak information within Russian Federation. Couple slides about geopolitics hope you like it this is Russia if someone doesn't know the population of Russia is 133 millions according to Wikipedia. To give you comparison it's pretty much it's a little bit more than in Mexico and about a half of population of United States of America. I'm asking you to imagine what if all the population all the people who live in Russia won't be able to receive information except from the information that delivered by government just think about that I'm not saying something so basically they will receive just propaganda it's something pretty much like I guess in North Korea for instance so government decides what information they will get from abroad is it good or bad just think about that and tell me afterwards also on the second slide you can see some more countries which are with a which are good friends of Russia they have lots of similarities these countries are autocratics or some would call it dictatorship these countries are fond of blocking the Internet they are fond of pursuing journalists and they like to get the best out of Russia you know I'm talking about the knowledge technologies of censorship and so on so forth together with Russia it's almost 250 millions of people it's pretty much the population of United States of America and the same questions the same question think what will happen if all those countries together with Russia will have no access to any information except for what government says to them once again it reminds me of Soviet Union we had that before and maybe some of that or your parents remember Cold War so it's not the good thing for people to be scared of die because of like nuclear strike and the last geopolitical slide sorry you can see it's a good partners of Russia which is China Iran Syria and of course North Korea and from what we know these countries are constantly have communication with Russia they have exchange of knowledge about the technologies China provides equipment for Russia for censorship once again what might go wrong if all those countries will work together and where it all goes so here I'm finishing my geopolitical part of the presentation I think what could go wrong we will get to this in the end of the presentation so and now let's get back to 2014 it's not exactly how it all started it's not the time when the like the ideas of control of the Internet has started it started a little bit before but in 2014 everything has become turbulent and these events brought us where we currently are I'm talking about this massive censorship I'm talking about the war in Ukraine I'm talking about all the other bad things that happening currently and when I googled what is the most important event in 2014 this is what I found ice bucket challenge I'm pretty sure this is not any how related to the massive censorship in Russia but if it would I would understand the government on the other part of the world at this moment in 2014 when the like ice bucket challenge was popular there was some serious events you remind them it's like when Ukrainian people took down pro-Russian president annexation of Crimea and consequent sanctions from European Union in USA against Russia and I guess we feel that that was the moment when something has changed and Russian government decided to change the direction they always wanted to control media market and internet but in 2014 I guess they decided that they need to invest more and this is the moment when everything has changed but I mean we have a saying there's no bad things without good things and in 2014 company named miduza was born the company I will tell you about currently basically Russian government started interfering to journalistic work and as you can see from the head heading of the article they fired editor in chief from one of the biggest independent internet media organizations and replaced her with a programming figure this was because she is this obey she didn't wanted to take down some articles and luckily or I don't know some a part of her team a part of land through left the company together with her and this was a start of the miduza and now I will explain why we are talking about a pirate ship so miduza 2014 the idea of the creation of the media we called it like we're gonna be pirates we will be pirate media what does that means so we will need a safe haven we will be independent from anyone we will obey no one we will be self-sufficient and we constantly will be attacked we constant we will be persecuted that apparently will be killed so we were like kind of pirates and you can see the photo actually we have lots of this black flag steel in our office and this is one of our like official symbols some like that so the safe haven for us become your opinion you know you know we started abroad from Russia this helped us to avoid interference it's in there and for government can interest sorry it's complicated work I cannot pronounce it governments can affect anyhow our work we decided that it would be decentralized leadership and funding so we will have no single person who owns the company who can affect anyhow us we expected that we will be blocked prosecuted attacked so security was priority for us and we wanted to be independent from everyone so we started with a technical team I told you about that and everything is built in-house website content management system mobile application everything and the important thing to mention that we decided that will be different I mean we pirate media we don't want to be like this smart serious news media we would like to appeal to younger generation because we were younger ourselves and we never use this smart language we always used to use the simple language like hey buddy let me explain you what does this new law means so we tried to explain politics through memes through jokes through swear words I don't know something like that we were never boring and another important thing to mention that we were always negative thinkers we were expecting that tomorrow we will be dead I mean tomorrow we will have no money tomorrow will be persecuted and you can see from the first design actually it didn't change much I mean it was dark because we thought we believe in the Gotham city something like that so and these negative thinking helped us a lot I will tell a little bit more about it later so moving to today nine years after like I mean it was difficult nine years we was dying I guess four times we was close to death there was like terrible accidents when for instance police planted drugs into the backpack of one hour journalist but now as of today right at the moment we are the biggest independent Russian-speaking media outlet the most influential and we still can reach millions of readers within Russian Federation despite being blocked there is some analytics it's boring I guess the important thing to know last year we have been blocked this year we have become real pirates because since 2023 we outlawed in Russia what does it means everyone who works for Medusa will go to jail everyone who partners with Medusa will go to jail everyone who donates money to Medusa will go to jail I'm talking about Russian people so in the meantime Russia didn't waste time of course and Russia was evolving technologically this picture once again we go back to 2014 this picture actually better explains what was with Russia in 2014 in terms of technologies I mean some of you maybe remember these pathetic attempts how they tried to block telegram and never succeeded actually but by now they managed to achieve something that seemed impossible back in the day all the experts like three four years just three four years ago all the technical experts were saying that it is not possible to build something similar to Chinese firewall in Russia but I can tell you by now they achieved the goal they managed to install DPI pretty much everywhere DPI stands for deep packet inspection it's like special boxes that analyze I mean you guys you smarter than me you know it if you do not know I encourage you to visit packet inspection village please do learn and then get back to me and help me to outsmart this shit you know thanks guys sorry can I use swear words okay sorry for that so on this chart you can see what was the difference between 21 in 2022 how drastically amount of blocking says increased some more graphs at the left hand side you see the chart from our friends Roskom Svoboda they block 20,000 websites every month in average and it's gets even worse nowadays and it's not just the pages it's whole sites because normally they block by mask at right hand side I'm not sure if you can clearly see it you can see it's it's the chart from our friends uni internet observatory and you can see this the type of websites they're blocking the biggest bubble is news media smaller ones but still big are it's circumvention it's a human rights it's social networks as file sharing so obviously you can see that they targeting like freedom of information and what pieces me off more than anything else the other big bubbles are porn and alcohol so they took information from us it was fine but then they took porn and alcohol and that's why Russians are so grumpy now and this actually the from my Google analytics from the website and this is a moment of blocking you can see it left-hand side there is we hit the top with 2 million unique readers a day which is a lot and the day after the blocking everything dropped by 90% so we left pretty much all the audience so you are a government you blocked everything you wanted all independent media porn what's your next step circumvention tools of course if you cannot watch porn you go and find a VPN service to watch porn they blocked tour immediately it's still can you can still use tour in Russia however it's not that easy for ordinary people they blocked all the major VPN services in Russia so and they continue blocking those even those that was called like bulletproof unblockable VPN services are not working well in Russia now they even forbid from any promotion of a PN service or circumvention tools if you ever would like to have instruction on your I don't know social network how to set up tour bridges you will be fine and you will go to jail they even started marketing campaign against VPN services or circumvention tools you can find in YouTube video when they tell you that VPN services are stealing your personal data I mean I mean they are right partially yeah so another thing that just happened a week ago they blocked wire guard and open VPN protocols so the reason for that is that in Russia have become self-hosted VPN services and normally they would buzz be based on wire guard so they blocked it couple words about media space control it's like quite boring for you I guess but the important thing like one of the weird laws that was issued just a couple weeks ago they obliged all the recommendation services new services to disclose to government their algorithms how smart it's how evil smart is that you know so obviously they will use this algorithm to make sure that people get in propaganda what about global companies so Facebook and Instagram actually whole meta was get the status of terroristic terroristic organization in Russia which means that you they have been blocked immediately but it's not that safe for you to use Instagram and Facebook now Twitter was blocked quite a while ago YouTube while I was preparing this presentation today morning we got the information that in some regions in Russia YouTube's no longer working we do not know yet if it's YouTube block or just like some problems Google and Apple all the time face different types of pressure normally it's like they have a lot of views they find Google news has been blocked a while ago and Google search has been blocked today so it's evolving pretty fast the last time I checked like several minutes ago in half of the Russia Google Google search is not long is no longer working and government pushes people to move to national platform but sometimes big tech companies help to a Russian government this happened a week ago when I was preparing the presentation Apple complied with the requirements of government and removed our best news podcast fortunately they get it back in several days but still I mean what will happen if they will remove our mobile application this does makes any sense because Google now blocked in Russia but before you know if you go to Russia you will never find me do that even do it's the biggest media outlets and in top 30 popular Google search you will find yellow media or propaganda media obviously it's not intentional this is because algorithm me do this blocked in Russia that's why Google puts it puts it down but it shouldn't be like that but how did we survive I mentioned the negative thinking and we were preparing to death and to be blocked quite a while ago so like several months before we were blocked we started thinking what can we do what will happen if government will block our website which are like the core product of the news media and we come up with some ideas they are not bright at all we just prepared some kind of the as always communication as we call it like hey guys like the giant banner on the website hey guys we will be blocked as soon as the word starts if the word starts and you should install VPN you should do this and that and that you should check our social networks you should check YouTube channel and so on so forth so we invested a lot like to we started new podcasts we started new video shows we even reinvented newsletters I mean which is like in 21st century who reads newsletters but I mean it worked perfectly great for us and I highlighted the phrase that what can we do before it's too late so it's like it's crucial thing if we would do it later we wouldn't we won't be successful and actually that's what happened when we were blocked so people lost access to the website I showed you the graphic the chart before and here you can see how for instance social networks boomed downloads of our mobile app it's like tripled multiplied by four and this is newsletter one of newsletters there's hundreds of thousand people signed up immediately and now one of my favorite parts the mobile application this is something we are very proud of we had mobile application from the very beginning there isn't for that view we are our thinking was that we can put anything we want under the hood of mobile application so basically we can integrate some circumvention tools and actually that's exactly what we've done right before the blocking several months before the blocking we started using like peer to peer basically if you install our app your phone because becomes a part of like some mesh pretty much like torrents I mean you know how that works I mean it it and it works well but I mean due to some issues with the battery drain and you know people are picky we need we stopped using the peer to peer then we were using some nice one of the biggest we can service as a part of our app but it was blocked together with our pen services and we moved to the simpler but yet reliable ways like automated mirror changes like broxing something like that and now we have some combination of the circumvention tools embedded to the app and this is something that we gonna like evolve develop further because we are preparing now for a worst for instance we have already implemented the pre-cash of the content for instance if you're reading the article the old articles are downloaded and I think that will prove itself when we start using again the peer to peer solution also we have the light version that we can feed within our app so it doesn't it's like takes just couple of kilobytes for article so it will work for the poor connectivity emergency mode when we can upload we have infrastructure for that we can upload to the Google cloud services so this is something you can hardly block without blocking whole Google which is happening currently and lots of other things we're working on automated mirror rotation this is another thing I would like to tell you about because we are very proud of to make automated mirror rotation you need three things the first one to discover that the link has been blocked issue and you mirror and deliver it to the user normally the problem in Russia with discovery so I know I don't know anyone who managed to solve it except except for us because of the specific of these dpi tools around of types of blockings around the Russia because dependent on the region they have different types some sometimes it's like throttling sometimes they have TLS connection sometimes they don't have so basically we're using our mobile app as the probe so they probing the mirrors and we have as soon as we have a lot of network issues above some particular threshold level we issue in you we issue in your mirror and deliver it to the reader and it takes like several seconds to get it to the mobile app this is boring okay I this is this is this is so much fun you know this was like the weird idea because I mean once again it's 21st century who will use PDF except for me for this presentation who uses PDF and we come up with the like weird idea that let's add a functionality that allows you to print out as the PDF file from the website any of articles like on this screenshot you can see it and actually we designed it's it's nice and beautiful design which fits perfectly for printing out and we were so surprised that hundred thousand of people uses this functionality and we had a lot of stories how grandparents or parents of some people asked them to print this out so they can read it like a newspaper and I mean this is weird idea but at the same time if it works and it works I mean it's better than people reading Medusa and they understand that anything they get from the government is a propaganda yeah our key idea that we never stop looking for new paths we always trying to find some this weird strange ideas to find the ways how to sneak in information to Russia to people like we have Instagram story generator we have we using instant view from telegram it's actually it's the nice thing whenever you send me do this link to somewhere through telegram you will see instant view you just click it and you will open article within the telegram and even if the site blocked it will be the full article light version of the website we collaborating with different companies like new segregators we providing them integrate them so they can get our information and so on and so forth and nice story by the way there was a guy in Russia who had a radio translator and he was just broadcasting through the radio our podcasts something like that I mean if that works then it works so what's the bottom line how much time we have what's the bottom line I mean we are this relatively small company and obviously we don't have those resources as Russian government has we don't have like so much money we don't have we have a small team small technical team but we are inventive weird and we are creative and we have a good will so like and we truly believe in the freedom information so people tend to help us which was surprising for me and that's why actually I'm here because what I've not from what I've noticed here are the most like brightest people the smartest people I ever saw in whole my life and if you have experience any experience in circumvention tools if you have experience in packets inspections if you know technologies please reach me out if there are people from the big tech big tech companies please reach me out we need your help if is there anyone who works for Russian government yeah so please reach me out I have some questions you know you you need to explain me what's going on so we are open for any collaboration any card of support will do like resources knowledge funding whatever or if you like us you know just or if you never read me do they never heard of me do that go and check the website at the bottom like me do the dot io slash en we have an English version if you can read in Russian check the Russian version and spread the word about us and also you can donate this is like this is not malware by the way it's just the link to the support site so you can go like and each buck bucks will matter and it looks like the last slide but it's not actually I have the bonus part of the presentation so what is the future of internet and Russia what should we expect in the future as we see from today's presentation just today they blocked Google and this is what's gonna happen in upcoming days months I guess all the global services that are not complying with Russian requirements Russian government requirements will be replaced by Russian services and this is something that already going on we can see it we can see that like Google Chrome is not the most popular browser anymore circumvention tools will be available only for advanced technical advanced users I explained to you before from what we know from the leaks they starting massively using AI tools and that helps them to faster discover and block the content including especially audio visual content normally we used to say that podcasts are below the raiders it's not the case anymore we expect that will they will start blocking mirrors far in the faster way because like a month ago they were blocking once per month now they're blocking three times a day if they will block us like ten times a day we can do nothing with that and sovereign internet and separation Russian people from outer world this is something that's gonna happen very very soon so like my you guys you can read Russian this is how we imagine Russian internet within what will happen with Russian internet within one year from now on so I mean my forecast would be that less than a year before each and every Russian will be isolated from outer information and we're getting back to my geopolitical slide so I mean we are in the negative fingers and this is last slide by the way we are the negative fingers and I mean we have the terrible forecasts that these these countries this part of the world soon become at least Russia will become some kind of the North Korea I mean yes this looks like the world collapses for us because we negative thinkers but I tell you you know we did already I don't know we're doing this forecast like four years in a row and the worst scenario are usually the most realistic scenario and it's pretty accurate and this was definitely will happen within one year we will have Russia separated from outer world within several years we will have Russia plus CIS some CIS countries and just think of what could happen if those countries will collaborate together but I'm optimistic here I mean I understand that Medusa only Medusa cannot can do nothing with that but I'm optimistic here because there's so many people who believe in freedom of information to freedom of speech so many bright people around and another thing we are goodies definitely I'm pretty sure about that so I think that we'll figure it out somehow and the future will prevail and I guess that's it thanks guys and I have these envelopes if you want to reach me out there's my contacts here and there's some nice stickers inside if you like you can just approach me I will give it away and you can get from the guy over there so thank you so much